When the sun came up in Saratoga Springs, New York, on May 15, 2009, it looked like a great morning for a bicycle ride: clear and sunny with temperatures forecast to be in the low 70s—perfect conditions for Bike to Work Day. On the corner of a park downtown, tables serving fresh fruit, yogurt, bagels, cream cheese, coffee, tea, and juice were set up and tended by volunteers from Saratoga's Healthy Transportation Network (HTN), and more than 100 riders turned out, with prizes (made from bike parts) awarded to businesses with the highest percentage of cyclists. Spirits were high, the enthusiasm was infectious, and many of the participants made a resolution to ride to work at least once a week from then on.

One of the cyclists was a little shorter and younger than the others. Just 12 years old, Adam Marino was a student at Maple Avenue Middle School—but since his parents always told him that school was his job, he'd announced that he wanted to bike to school that day. This wasn't terribly surprising, as all the Marinos are avid cyclists. The family had twice pedaled the 363-mile length of the Erie Canal from Buffalo to Albany, as well as the one-day, 40-mile Five Boro Bike Tour in New York City. So when Adam declared his desire to ride to school, his mother, Janette, thought it was great, partly because it demonstrated his continuing resolve to overcome certain medical challenges. Two years earlier, Adam had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and as an infant, he had been classified as legally blind. The rods and cones in Adam's eyes were underdeveloped at birth but, thanks to early intervention and therapy, he now has corrected vision of 20-200—he plays soccer, medals in Nordic ski races, is an honor-roll student, plays trumpet in the school jazz band, and has been riding a bike since age three. "He may or may not be able to drive someday," Janette says. "He can't read road signs from a distance, but functionally he does very well."

Adam's future independence had been a factor in the family's decision to move to Saratoga Springs, a pleasant, prosperous, compact community of 28,000 with accessible and well-funded elementary schools. "We wanted [him] to be able to hop on a bike, go downtown, and get around on his own," Janette explains. "We didn't want to have to tote him back and forth." Still, when the family arrived in Saratoga in 1999, they'd had a Blind Child Area warning sign installed on their street.

On the outskirts of Saratoga Springs, Maple Avenue is also called U.S. Highway 9, and, before splitting off briefly on its own as it heads downtown, it merges with Broadway, Route 50, and the truck route of NY 29. To reach the school, Janette and Adam took North Broadway, a quiet side street that ends at abandoned, unpaved Glen Mitchell Road—more like a trail than anything else—that leads through a patch of woods. Adam handled it with no problem on his fat-tire bike, and when Janette pointed out a hawk taking off from a tree, mother and son agreed that this was an awesome way to get to school.

When they reached the entrance, though, the atmosphere decidedly changed. Maple Avenue's student body of 1,650 is delivered via 39 school buses—and as at thousands of other communities around the country, many parents elect to drive their children. Thus, every weekday morning, scores of idling cars line up behind dozens of buses disgorging waves of kids. Amidst this, Janette and Adam—each of whom was about 5 feet tall—seemed like a pair of diminutive daredevils wading into a tsunami.

As Adam locked his bike to a fence, a radio call came in to the administrative office. "Security told me that two bikes were getting involved with the buses," remembers the school principal, Stuart Byrne. "We hadn't heard from anyone beforehand. My assistant responded and said, 'Where are they?'"

An assistant principal, Robert Loggins, found Janette in front of the school, waiting for a lull in the traffic so she could depart. Adam had already gone inside.

"What are you doing here?" Loggins asked Janette.

Janette thought this an odd question. "It's Bike to Work Day," she said. "Did you ride your bike to school?"

"Bicycling isn't allowed at Maple Avenue School," said Loggins.

Janette did a double take. "You're kidding me," she said. "Right?"

Loggins wasn't smiling. He said that Adam's bike would be placed in the school's boiler room, and Janette should come back and get it later that day in her car.

It should be mentioned that, despite her small physical stature, Janette is not a shrinking violet. In her nearby hometown of Troy, she'd created a community newsletter, started a beautification committee, and run for city council. When she was growing up there, the first thing she'd bought herself, at age 10 (with money earned delivering newspapers), was a bike. She'd later lived for a while in Seattle, where cycling had been her main transportation.

"That's not going to work for me," Janette told Loggins flatly, and proceeded to ask for evidence of the policy in writing.

Principal Byrne was watching the exchange through his office window. "I could tell from the body language that what was going on wasn't good," he remembers.

Byrne and Janette knew each other. Her daughter had gone to school with his son, and the families attended the same church. Byrne was thus aware of the Marinos' cycling experience—but he also knew about the Blind Child Area sign on their street. "Please ask Janette to come see me," he said over the radio.

When Janette arrived in Byrne's office, the principal found her "extremely upset." She insisted that Adam should be able to ride to school any day he wanted, and she refused to come back later by car to pick up him and his bike, saying that she would return as she had planned—to ride home with him at the end of the day.

Leading the pack: In Clifton Park, NY, school superintendent Robinson (canter) helps make cycling happen.

"I told her that we could probably work it out," Byrne says. "The Marinos are a special case; knowing how careful a rider Janette is, I was looking for a compromise point and trying to work with her as an individual parent. But because of the [no-bicycle] policy, I didn't want Adam's bike chained up to the fence all day. I wanted it somewhere it would be safe."

As Janette left the school and rode back downtown, she just kept getting madder. "It went from being such a great day to being made to feel I'd done something horrible," she says. "The district didn't have any right to tell us how to get to school. Adam and I weren't hurting anyone—we were transporting ourselves in a healthy and environmentally beneficial manner. Meanwhile, the school district was spending more than a million dollars on 16 new buses—but I was riding past all these other parents driving their kids in cars, and they weren't getting in trouble in any way."

When she found a friend, Joanne Klepetar, back at the Bike to Work breakfast table, Janette broke down. "She was crying uncontrollably," Klepetar remembers. "But when she told me what had happened, I took her by the shoulders, looked her in the eye, and said, 'This is the opportunity we've been waiting for.'"

Maple Avenue Middle School is not unique. Built in 1991 on 50 acres on the northern edge of Saratoga Springs (on property shared by the neighboring towns of Wilton and Greenfield, which also send children there), it's the only middle school for the entire 110-square-mile Saratoga Springs City School District. This kind of planning is a national trend: As a 2002 report compiled by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) explained, over the past several decades communities around the country have abandoned old, centrally located schools in densely populated neighborhoods and built new facilities on bigger properties far from the center of town. For middle schools, the Council of Education Facility Planners recommends at least 20 acres of land plus another acre for every 100 students—a policy that, according to the NTHP, amounts to "the construction of giant educational facilities in remote, middle-of-nowhere locations that rule out the possibility of anyone walking to school."

That last part is supported in detail by the U.S. Department of Transportation. According to its surveys, in 2009 only 13 percent of all children walked or rode to school, whereas in 1969 nearly half (48 percent) did. The remoteness of the new schools is not the only cause: Among students who lived within one mile of school 43 years ago, 88 percent walked or bicycled, while today only 38 percent do.

When cycling advocate Jeff Olson's son, Izak, rides to Maple Avenue Middle School, his bike is just one of a few in the rack.

Experts blame broad, gradual cultural changes for the decline, as well. "We've gotten so used to ferrying kids around in cars," laments Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB). "And there are so many other distractions now—most of them involving a screen." In addition, although the generous real-estate guidelines for new schools do mean that, generally, gyms and fields are included in the megacomplexes, because of budget cuts and other issues in modern education, only about a third of American children now take physical education daily—despite the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' recommendation that children get 60 minutes of aerobic activity every day.

The effects of all this are predictable. According to the nation's public-health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 17 percent of American kids between the ages of two and 19 are obese—a figure that has tripled since 1980, with attending consequences on rates of hypertension, heart disease, osteoporosis, and type 2 diabetes (not the kind that Adam Marino has). According to the CDC, ailments related to low levels of physical activity, such as heart disease and stroke, are among the leading causes of death in the United States, and both hazards can be ameliorated by exercise such as walking and bicycling.

The team leader for the CDC's Healthy Community Design Initiative, Arthur Wendel, is charged with altering the design of cities and towns to improve public health. No dogmatic evangelist, he acknowledges that cycling can be hazardous; he brings up, for example, a 2002 report by the Transportation Research Board (a collaboration between the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine) titled "The Relative Risks of School Travel." This report showed that the highest number of fatalities and injuries occurring on the way to school are among teenagers who drive themselves in cars—but after that, the second most come from bicycling. Still, he contends that the takeaway message shouldn't be that kids should neither drive nor bike. It's "that all forms of transportation carry some risk of injury, but only a few have health benefits. Bicycling is one."

Some of the CDC's motivation is economic. Although the rise in health-care costs has other sources, the nationwide decline in physical activity and increase in poor health contribute to the fact that Americans spend 17 percent of their income on health-care costs, whereas in 1960 they spent 5 percent. With 20 percent projected by 2019, says Wendel's colleague Ken Rose, policy director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, "We need to be able to reduce diseases, and active transportation is a safe and easy way to do that."

But as Janette was to learn in Saratoga Springs—and as demonstrated every day in every bike-unfriendly school district in the country—safety and ease are subjective.

Emma Hanley, 9, of Tallahassee, FL, has been riding to school since kindergarten.

Judging from its town motto—"Health, History, Horses"—Saratoga Springs seems like a place that would be receptive to alternative transportation. The site of 110-year-old Skidmore College and the 150-year-old Saratoga Race Course, surrounded by parks and preserves and mineral springs, it was founded as a resort community between the Hudson River and the foothills of the Adirondacks. Its tastefully redeveloped downtown is full of restaurants, cafés, and boutiques, and it's home to organizations such as Sustainable Saratoga, Shared Access Saratoga, the aforementioned Healthy Transportation Network, and Saratoga PLAN (Preserving Land and Nature). The longtime home of the bike builder Serotta, and close to such annual undertakings as the Tour of the Battenkill race, the area has a dedicated cycling community—but it's one that, as in most of the United States, constitutes only a small percentage of the populace, a subculture on the fringes of the community at large, which doesn't understand cycling as a sport nor take it seriously as transportation.

Politically, the town is split: Its mayor, state senator, and U.S. representative are Republican, but the majority of city council is Democratic. Saratoga Springs has a commission form of government that seats the mayor on the city council with an equal vote, resulting in frequent deadlocks. In any case, the council—a part-time job fulfilled largely by businesspeople—has no jurisdiction over the school district, which sets its own tax rates and budgets.

Although Maple Avenue Middle School has 1,650 students, it isn't an entirely typical megaschool. For example, it's about 2 miles from the center of Saratoga Springs—a distance easily traversed by bike. Ironically enough, it is situated on U.S. 9, a designated New York state bike route, with wide shoulders and relatively light traffic—except, that is, for early morning and midafternoon, when the school itself creates bumper-to-bumper logjams. The district has made repeated requests for a traffic signal at the school entrance, only to hear the catch-22 that, during most of the day, there aren't enough cars to warrant it. In light of all this (and although students at Saratoga Springs High School, in a different part of town, are allowed to bicycle to school), the district's transportation policy includes this sentence: The Board of Education forbids the riding of bicycles by students to and from the Maple Avenue Middle School.

Principal Stuart Byrne says the ban is safety-driven. "Obviously bike riding is healthy," Byrne says. "Never on earth is our thought that bike riding isn't good—but traffic here has increased tremendously in 18 years." In 1995, in an attempt to calm the hectic entrance and exit hours, Byrne hired an off-duty policeman to direct traffic. "It was a bright, sunny Friday afternoon," he says of one memorable day during the officer's first week at work. "The buses were just starting to roll—and I can still hear the screeching tires. Five minutes later he came inside, whiter than that sheet of paper. He said he'd almost gotten it both ways." Byrne cancelled the experiment; eventually the school got a crosswalk, but there's no sidewalk, nor any traffic light other than a flashing School Zone warning. Even kids who live directly across the street from school are required to get there every day by either bus or car.

"I don't think Stu Byrne's initial [concern] was the safety of our kids," says Janette Marino. "If it were, they would have put in a traffic light when the school was originally built—and kids wouldn't have to be on a bus for 40 minutes." Janette points to studies (performed by the National Resources Defense Council, Coalition for Clean Air, and University of California at Berkeley) that show diesel-exhaust levels inside some school buses are more than eight times higher than the average content of the air outside—and, as children's lungs are more susceptible to toxins, the report surmises that ailments such as cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma can ensue. Still, parents who then conclude that the safest course is to drive a child to school should be aware that, while 85 children under age 16 were killed while cycling in the United States in 2009 (the year the Marinos caused a ruckus), more than 15 times as many—1,314—kids under age 15 died in motor-vehicle crashes.

Unfortunately, school districts today have to consider numbers other than rates of injury and chances of death. In 2007, the New Jersey Supreme Court let stand a settlement of $6 million to the family of a nine-year-old boy who was hit by a car (and paralyzed from the neck down) two hours after leaving school on foot—even though, despite multiple notices of an early-dismissal day, the boy's parents hadn't arranged for their son to be supervised or picked up.

"Until courts start throwing out absurd lawsuits, [schools] have to reflexively think of things [they] can be sued for, and proactively get rid of them before they happen," says Lenore Skenazy. "Then all kinds of crazy things happen, like building short park slides and not allowing overnights. Free-range is not only mind reform—it's tort reform." Skenazy is referring to the title of her book (and blog) Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry). A former columnist for the New York Sun, she came to national prominence in 2008 when she wrote about allowing her nine-year-old boy to ride the subway alone—a decision that landed her on television and radio shows from Today to Nightline. "Somehow, a whole lot of parents are convinced that nothing outside the home is safe," Skenazy wrote in her book. "At the same time, they're also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods—or even took public transportation—they can't imagine their own offspring doing the same thing. They have lost confidence in everything: Their neighborhood. Their kids. And their own ability to teach their children how to get by in the world."

Indeed, one of the safety factors that eventually arose as Saratoga Springs debated the issue of cycling to school was the fear of crime against unsupervised children. Residents were reminded that in 2005, a suspected sex offender had tried to abduct a female runner who was leaving cross-country practice at Saratoga Springs High School; the girl fought off her attacker, who was arrested and subsequently pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping.

Isabella Macarelli, 9, and Gabriella Macarelli, 7, of Arvada, CO, ride to school and their swim-team practices.

Skenazy's website is rife with statistics that should go far to neutralize such worries. In the United States, for example, three out of four people believe that violent crime is getting worse, even though it has actually been declining since 1993. On the issue of kidnapping, she reports, "Underage kids are 26 times more likely to die as passengers in a car crash than be murdered by an abductor." Of 800,000 children reported missing in the United States each year, 90 percent return home within 24 hours; the vast majority are teenage runaways, and most of the other 10 percent are taken by estranged spouses, neighbors, or other family members.

Still, Skenazy admits, "A story like Jaycee Dugard's will always loom larger in our brain than statistics. We live in a society that tells parents if they aren't afraid every second of the day, they aren't good parents—and the magical way to keep [kids] safe is to worry about them all the time. Many places now won't allow a bus to drop a kid off unless a parent is waiting at the bus stop."

The United States isn't the only place where people feel this way. One British study found that over the course of four generations, the distance that eight-year-old children in one family (the Thomases of Sheffield, England) were allowed to roam from home had shrunk from 6 miles (for great-grandfather George in 1926) to one mile (for grandfather Jack in 1950) to half a mile (for mother Vicky in 1979) to 300 yards (for son Ed in 2007). Another study reported that, on average, today's children are two years older than their parents were when first allowed to do things like use public transportation, sleep over at a friend's house, or babysit for a younger sibling.

"Walking the dog, playing kickball at the park, drawing on the sidewalk, organizing a carnival—anything kids do on their own rather than being driven to places where things are being done for them—are in the same box as bicycling," Skenazy says. "It's called childhood. I rode my bike to the library all the time when I was growing up, but now bikes don't seem to be anywhere near the part of childhood they used to be. Electronic gadgets are part of [the problem], but so are organized activities. After school, kids don't have a few hours to do what they want before dinner. Along with kidnapping, parents' most horrifying fear is for a child to fall behind—so they always have some kind of supervised activity, like soccer practice or Mandarin class. We do these thing out of love. But when parents help or supervise you, it's a very different feeling from doing something on your own. Kids end up getting the message: 'We don't believe in you. You can't do it yourself. You'll only be successful if I'm at your side.'"

Andy Clarke of LAB agrees. "Getting to school is just the most identifiable part of the issue, like the journey to work that we focus on for adults," he says. "The bigger story is not purposeful—it's the joy of just riding a bike, learning how gears and brakes work, kicking around the neighborhood and having new stuff happen. The loss of ability to do that is critical, because it means we've forgotten all the other things in the public realm that contribute to it."

After the Marinos were reprimanded for cycling to Maple Avenue Middle School, Janette and Adam decided to continue defying the rule. They kept riding for the rest of that school year, storing Adam's bike in the boiler room during the day; after the first incident, they were joined by friends such as Joanne Klepetar, and within a month they and their allies made their thoughts known at a meeting of the Saratoga Springs board of education. Janette proposed that bicycling be allowed with parental consent, on the condition that students wear helmets, dismount on sidewalks, and lock their bikes to racks (furnished by the schools). She also suggested the formation of a Go Green and Healthy transportation committee with members from the school board, city planning and safety departments, and the cycling community. "Our school district needs to get in gear with change," she concluded.

In response, the board's president, Frank Palumbo, revealed that his own town of Wilton (located across Maple Avenue from the school) was considering a bike and pedestrian path to connect to a local park and elementary school. He pointed out, however, that such developments are the responsibilities of towns, not school districts—to which Kelly DeFeciani, a spokesperson from the city of Clifton Park to the south, responded that her community was creating just such a network of trails between schools and residential neighborhoods, funded largely by a grant from the Safe Routes to School National Partnership.

In the wake of all this, in June 2009 the board of education appointed a committee to review its transportation policy. It was comprised of school officials and local residents, including Adam Marino and a 48-year-old transportation planner named Jeff Olson—formerly the director of New York State's bicycling and pedestrian program, now East Coast principal for Alta Planning and Design, an organization that promotes human-powered transportation around the country. Olson teaches a course called "Bicycling, Walking, and Trails" in the urban planning department at the University at Albany-State University of New York, and having previously written New York's statewide guidelines for schools seeking to change their policies, he proposed a "red-yellow-green" approach for Saratoga Springs, classifying each school (one middle and six elementary) as unsafe, iffy, or safe for walking and bicycling—the goal would be for all to eventually turn green.

Parke Miller, 9, of Charlotte, NC, rides his Redline Conquest cyclocross bike one mile to and from school.

Over the summer, committee members met five times. They took pictures of every school site, identifying access points and suggesting places for racks and crosswalks. "It wasn't unanimous about what we wanted to see [happen]," says Caroline Stem, an HTN member who served on the committee. "There's so much politics in the school district. The advisory committee had to make recommendations to the policy committee, which made recommendations to the school board; the language was waffly and contingent, which made [some of] us uncomfortable as to whether it would actually be favorable to walking and bicycling. I do a lot of facilitation in my own work, and I was floored by how noncollaborative and not very transparent it was."

By the time the new school year began, no policy changes had been made. In fact, the night before the first day of classes, a barrage of robocalls went out to parents, reminding them that walking and bicycling were not permitted at Maple Avenue.

Janette asked her son what he wanted to do. "Adam decided to stand his ground," she says. "So I called Stu Byrne, and I told him that we would be riding."

The next morning, Janette and Adam resumed the civil disobedience of the previous spring, arriving at Maple Avenue by bike. Wearing his backpack and cycling sunglasses, Adam locked his 21-speed Giant to a front gate (an "ideal spot" for attracting attention, he points out) and they started walking into the building. Their entry was suddenly blocked, however, by two men: assistant principal Loggins and New York state trooper Phil Poitier.

Conjuring, for some, unfortunate memories of governor George Wallace—who personally barred black students from entering the University of Alabama registration building in 1963—Loggins re-informed the Marinos that they were "out of compliance" with school policy. Janette directed Adam to go inside, then told the enforcers she had to deliver his diabetes supplies to the school nurse. When she came back out, she was informed that the assistant superintendent for secondary schools, Mike Piccirillo—chairman of the study committee that met over the summer—was on his way.

When Piccirillo arrived, he told everybody to back off and calm down. "We're not going to back down," Janette said, declaring that she and Adam wouldn't stop riding "unless you tell the other parents not to drive their kids."

At that point it seemed as if the off-season deliberations hadn't even happened. Adam's bike went back in the boiler room, and the next day the Marinos were again accompanied by other parents and students. Finally forced to admit that they had no real authority over any family's mode of transport (only over students' conduct on school property), the increasingly beleagured administrators moved the bikes around each day, trying to store them out of sight in various places on school property.

But it was now too late to conceal the issue. The local newspaper, The Saratogian, which had followed the story the previous spring, was back on the scene when the Marinos returned to school in September, and within the next couple of weeks, the saga was picked up by the Schenectady Daily Gazette and Albany Times Union. Finally, on October 3, Fox News carried the headline "New York Mom Fights Middle School that Banned Her Bike Rides with Son."

At that point it became evident that the Marinos' story wasn't just tofu for ecofreaks but red meat for libertarians, right-to-privacy adherents, and anti-government Tea Party activists. "Here was a diabetic kid who was doing everything right," Olson observes, "and he was being defined as an enemy of the state."

Letters flooded into Saratoga Springs from around the country, both pro and con. "Some people accused [my husband and me] of not caring about Adam's safety," Janette remembers. "One of them asked, 'How would you feel if your son got run over by a car? The rules are there for a reason.' It was odd that such a simple move could cause so much havoc. After all, it was just about transportation—getting from Point A to Point B. It wasn't meant as a political act, but it appealed to both sides for different reasons."

The peak of political attention occurred in early October, when a letter from Newt Gingrich arrived in the school district's mailbox. "At a time when nearly one-third of American children and teens are overweight or on the brink of obesity, students like Adam who exhibit healthy behavior should not be punished but rather rewarded," the ex-congressman wrote. Meanwhile, a few of Adam's fellow eighth-graders chided him. "One would say things like, 'Does your mommy still have to take care?' and 'Did you ride your mommy bike today?'" he relates. "I just asked him, 'What's a mommy bike? Define that.'" (In many ways wiser than his years, Adam explains that "middle school is kind of a complicated place. I gave up worrying about it a while ago.")

To say that the Saratoga Springs school board meeting of October 13, 2009, when the advisory committee's recommendations were on the agenda, was keenly anticipated would be an understatement. Dozens of cycling advocates showed up, along with reporters and cameras from several TV stations. As expected, the board agreed to revise its policy to accommodate bicycles—but exactly where and how remained unclear. The new guidelines said that bicycling would be allowed with parental permission if filed in writing in advance; moreover, every bike would need to have a registration tag, and parents of cycling students would be required to accompany their children to and from school. But all of this would take place only after "due diligence" determined whether adequate safety conditions existed at each school—a process to be pursued by teams of teachers and parents with no specific deadline.

Harrison Hirsch, 11, and his brother Tristan, 9, from Glendale, CA, ride with their dad, who pedals to work after dropping them off.

Two more months passed before any "due diligence" findings were revealed. In December the board announced that, at four schools (including Maple Avenue), students would be permitted to "bring bicycles onto school property" via designated points of entry—after racks were installed the following spring. At three other outlying schools, however, owing to "heavy traffic and inadequate shoulders," bicycling was still deemed too dangerous to be allowed.

"One approach was for the school board to deal only with Janette and Adam," says Olson. "Another was to encourage more kids to bike. Instead, they made it look like they did that, but didn't actually do it—the board made bicycling allowable, but still very difficult. The result is that, out of several thousand [K–8] kids, three or four are now biking to school."

In October 2011, I rode to Maple Avenue Middle School with Olson and two of those kids—his 11-year-old son, Izak, and a friend, Liam Morrison, both of whom had just started sixth grade. In the wake of an overnight rainstorm, the helmeted trio coasted up to my hotel in downtown Saratoga at 7 a.m., the boys wearing backpacks, Olson a yellow parka; at 50, he looked more like 35, with shaggy dark hair and elfin facial features, his cheeks rosy from the morning cold.

Although he grew up in New Jersey, Olson's mother is a native of Saratoga Springs, where Jeff himself moved in 1987 after graduating from nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Having watched his home in Bergen County, New Jersey, evolve "from a rural suburb to a bunch of shopping malls where it was dangerous to ride a bike," he spent three years in Washington, DC, working on a coast-to-coast cycling route for the Millennium Trails program. Now just returned from Jackson Hole, Wyoming—where he helped to overhaul its trail system after two cyclists were "run down in broad daylight"—he was trying to promote a local trail network with Saratoga Springs at its hub, connecting with the Hudson River Greenway south to New York City, the Erie Canal west to Toronto, and the Champlain Canal north to Montreal. He was finding the going difficult, however.

"There's a legacy here of preservation and conservation advocacy, and it's a great landscape for cycling—things are close together, with a vibrant downtown," says Olson. "But we need the full support of the business community and local government, which is not trying to change itself." For example, in 2008, when a subsurface water pipe was built from the Hudson along an old railroad line to GlobalFoundries' new computer-chip factory outside town, the county declined to acquire the surface rights, which could have led to a bike trail that spanned the entire county. Within the city itself, a recent proposal to redesign Broadway—from four lanes to three, with bike lanes on both sides—was also shot down.

"The attitude was 'Broadway is great now—why change it?'" said Olson. "It's hard for people who've grown up in the suburban lifestyle to imagine not driving your car every day. To school board members who live outside town, it's totally alien—and they vote on things that make it impossible for others."

We pushed off for school, skirting the main street via one of the separate, unmerged sections of Maple Avenue, which runs parallel to it downtown. In less than half a mile, though, we had to cross Route 9, whose four lanes of speeding traffic displayed a "Pedestrians and Bicycles Prohibited" sign at a traffic light. We waited for our signal to cross, but the light never changed for us.

"This is designed to be tripped only by something as big as a car," Olson explained as we stood there astride our bikes. "It doesn't even detect four of us standing here. This is part of what I call 'death by a thousand cuts.' The average person isn't comfortable waiting by a busy road, so things like this become barriers."

When we got a gap in the traffic, we crossed against the red light and turned onto North Broadway—the route the Marinos followed on that fateful day in May '09. At the corner we passed three kids, who watched us go by while waiting for the bus. The storm had cleared, and the landscape was lit by the rising sun, the clouds turning pink above the brilliant red and orange trees of October.

North Broadway (which passes the eastern entrance to Skidmore College) is lined by palatial mansions, many of which are occupied only during the horse-racing season. The houses have enormous porches and columns in front, standing guard over immaculate lawns beneath the elms and maples. "It's a treat to ride down this street in the morning," Olson commented. "Kind of Norman Rockwell, isn't it? The sort of thing you want your kids to be able to do and enjoy. Look to your right and you can see all the way into Vermont." Sure enough, as we passed an intersection, a distant range of hills in the east evinced our lofty vantage point. Nevertheless, North Broadway itself was almost perfectly flat, and wide enough for four lanes of traffic (though no bike stripes had been painted on the pavement).

At its northern end, the asphalt ended, giving way to unpaved Glen Mitchell Road. "Skidmore College and Maple Avenue Middle School were built on a former estate, so the woods have a network of carriage roads and trails in them," said Olson. "The college owns the land on either side, so half the people in town don't even know this is here. It's faded from memory, but technically it's a city street. We just call it the trail to the school."

Eric, 7, and Laurel Anderson, 9, of Vienna, VA, ride with their sister Carina, 11, who recently made a presentation to the local school board on the importance of keeping bike education in the curriculum.

As the boys rode onto the path, Olson called out, "Guys, one word: It is wet this morning. So pay attention." The grade was all downhill, descending over a series of rocky ledges covered by wet leaves, which obscured bumps and holes. On the narrow-tired beater that Olson had loaned me, the ride was pretty dicey—for several minutes, the only sounds were crackling leaves, rattling cables, and squealing brakes. At the bottom, I had to admit, I wasn't sure I'd want my own kids riding this trail—especially unsupervised.

"All you'd need to do is drive a grader down it," Olson said. "We've got lots of people in this town who would volunteer to help. What we don't have is leadership, or a school district or local government making it happen." By contrast, Olson said, the town of Bentonville, Arkansas—headquarters of Walmart, and roughly the same size as Saratoga Springs—established bike trails, safety patrols, and a mountain-bike team at its middle school, which happens to border on an old trail through a patch of woods.

Glen Mitchell Road came out at the back side of Maple Avenue School. Pedaling around to the front, we were confronted by a flotilla of buses with flashing lights, backed by a long line of cars depositing kids on the sidewalk. The bicycle rack was on an island between the school and the road; to reach it, we had to negotiate three crosswalks through incoming traffic. Unlike the crossings at the vehicle dropoff points, these were unattended by teachers.

"Kids on bikes are still made to feel like second-class citizens here," Olson observed. "Look at the size of the space in front of the school—it should have a sheltered bike-parking area. Instead the kids have to park by the road and walk back through three crossings of this busy entrance. They're made to feel as if they're in some suburban parking lot—which is exactly where they are. At really good schools, they would be welcomed—the principal would be out here, and there would be a system for counting how many days a kid has ridden, and a prize for the person who walks or bikes the most. But this school isn't doing that."

The rack had space for at least 20 bikes, but Izak's and Liam's were the only two there. After the boys went inside, Olson divulged that Liam had just violated school policy—by riding to school with someone other than his own parent. "A Skidmore professor was sanctioned recently for walking to work across the school grounds here," Olson added. "She was told that adults are not allowed here during school hours, even to access the trail. We live in a lot of fear."

To return downtown, Olson and I had to go back across Route 9 in front of the school, despite its notorious lack of a traffic light. "This is the kind of crossing that experienced cyclists feel comfortable doing, but people with children don't," Olson said. Nevertheless, we were following a route that one of Olson's fellow parents rides regularly with her kids: Loughberry Lake Road, which traces the eastern shore of the city's reservoir—an attractive, expansive body of water, which at this time of year was lined by scarlet and vermilion foliage and dotted with Canada geese. Olson and I paused to behold this spectacle: cacophonous waves of honking and splashing, wing beats thrashing the water as the migrating flocks landed and took off. It seemed the essence of what Richard Louv thinks today's kids are missing.

Louv is the author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder—a book that, bemoaning the predominance of computer games and organized activities (including sports), celebrates the value of contact with the natural world. Besides enumerating the creative benefits of unstructured outdoor play—climbing trees, catching frogs, building forts—Louv cites studies showing the therapeutic effects of "green" surroundings on kids diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The upshot of such involvement can be a marked improvement not only on basic tasks and tests, but also in an overall sense of self-worth. "As the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically," Louv writes. "Nature—the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful—offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot."

Augmenting the sounds and scenery was the fact that lightly trafficked Loughberry Lake Road had recently been repaved. The amalgam was an utterly elysian bike route—if only there'd been a traffic light where it came out at Maple Avenue Middle School.

For an example of a city trying harder to create cycling opportunities for kids, I had to go only 17 miles to the south. As mentioned earlier, the town of Clifton Park, New York—a larger, more sprawling, less tony suburb than Saratoga Springs, with no real city center—has been building a network of trails between neighborhoods, libraries, athletic clubs, and schools, many of which (elementary, middle, and secondary) are located on one central campus. In 2010, to stimulate interest in bicycling, the area's Shenendehowa Central School District gave away 400 helmets and water bottles bearing its logo, and this year it will complete a "functional art" project, soliciting quirky bike-rack designs from students, to be installed in public places. Much of this was funded or facilitated by a $488,500 grant from Safe Routes to School, largely thanks to a proactive school superintendent named L. Oliver Robinson.

"The difference between here and Saratoga Springs is the political will to make it happen," Robinson told me the day after I rode to school with Olson. "You can inspire people to do things, or you can embarrass them to do things. Liability will always exist. We can't allow it to hamper progress."

An unusual, charismatic character—a native of Jamaica, one-time defensive back at Brown University, and, for what it's worth, the only African American I saw during my visit—Robinson seemed almost supernaturally upbeat and energetic. "I'm not a bike aficionado," he demurred, "but I'd seen kids walking and riding in unsafe situations on the sides of roads and crossing major thoroughfares without lights. This community wasn't constructed for walking—it's been called a suburb on steroids, but recently people have been doing open-space preservation because they want it to be more than a driving community. When one district resident, who works for the Department of Transportation, asked if we were open to [the SRTS] opportunity, it took about a year to bring it together, but we were able to piggyback onto some construction projects we already had going—renovating buildings and a stadium, resurfacing a track and sidewalk."

This was the kind of coordination that seemed to be lacking in Saratoga Springs. "Most people don't plan things when they put them in place," Robinson agreed. "But we try to create partnerships, so that a thousand dollars from one organization can turn into ten thousand dollars from another organization. [Clifton Park] is a recreational community—there are always people out running, walking, and roller skating, even more for health and wellness than for getting to school. So my attitude is 'If you build it, they will come'—and in the end, our D.O.T. award was the largest in this region, because they knew that we would get it done."

Robinson drove me around to show off some of the improvements. One, a path connecting an elementary school to a YMCA, passed through a wooded wetland—the kind of spot that gives helicopter parents the heebie-jeebies. "That's part of the paranoia we have," Robinson acknowledged. "People do sue the hell out of schools; 'no good deed goes unpunished' kicks in very quickly. But if you let that stop you, you never get anything done. So if somebody says, 'I was using a path you built and something happened to me,' well, I hate to say it but that's what lawyers are for. Our standard is: Are we acting like a responsible parent?"

Other paved paths wound through the school's main campus, connecting various school buildings with libraries and playing fields. Robinson said the mileage markers are incorporated into phys-ed classes, and I saw lots of kids walking on the trails at dismissal time. But in the course of a 45-minute tour, I didn't see a single kid on a bike—either on campus or off.

Robinson admitted that about 85 percent of the students in the district continue to get to school by bus or car—bicycles are still mainly considered weekend recreation. "My son will ride his bike up and down the street in our neighborhood for an hour, then come in the house and say, 'Dad, drive me to Stewart's to get a Gatorade,'" he sighed. "It's only a quarter of a mile away, but there's a big difference [between recreation and transportation] in his mind. That's why we didn't want to give kids the impression that they had to do this. We wanted it to seem natural, leisurely, and organic—a viable option, not another mandated thing to do. If they want to use it, the access is there—so maybe they'll realize that, if their parents can't drive them to school, riding a bike isn't so bad."

Not so bad? I always assumed kids and bikes were like peanut butter and jelly. When I asked one of my cycling friends, who has two elementary-school-age daughters, whether they ride to school, he answered: "They wish."

In 2010, spurred by the Marino family's fight with school authorities, cycling advocates in Saratoga Springs formed an independent committee dedicated to finding ways to increase the number and safety of local children walking or cycling to schools. Thanks to the group's efforts, the school district won a $1,500 grant from Safe Routes to School (referred to by principal Stuart Byrne as "Safe Bike Routes or whatever their name is"), helping facilitate three achievements over the following year: a safety poster contest, a bike rodeo teaching skills and safety practices, and a day of teacher training conducted by a representative from Bike New York. A fourth goal—a survey of local parents, de rigeur for any SRTS program—was posted on the school district's website in June 2011, but appearing as it did during the summer vacation months, it received fewer than 100 responses (in a school district of 6,635 students). A second grant application to Safe Routes to School was subsequently turned down, and a move to develop a bike trail on Glen Mitchell Road fizzled, smothered by jurisdictional issues.

As a "mom and apple pie" program that, in some ways, harks back to those Norman Rockwell-tinged days when nobody (supposedly) had to worry about kids treading the sidewalk or pedaling the street, Safe Routes to School has few avowed enemies. As the Marino family discovered, lip service in support of cycling spans the political spectrum—Republicans defending individual liberty, Democrats environmental responsibility. In the current Congressional climate, however, actual backing for bicycling and walking is withering.

In 2010, the "father of SRTS" in the United States, James Oberstar (D-MN), was voted out of office in the Tea Party rebellion, and in 2011 Baldwin County, Alabama, turned down a $75,000 SRTS grant, terming it an example of "what is destroying our nation" (and calling on parents to take more responsibility for their kids). This year, the 2013 Obama budget proposes to cut funding for the CDC's Healthy Community Design Initiative. The 2005 transportation bill, which among other things created federal funding for Safe Routes to School, and which has been temporarily extended nine times since it expired in 2009, faces the end of its current extension in July. Earlier this year, representative John Mica (R-FL) proposed the so-called American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act, which—besides downgrading funding for mass transit and opening coastal waters to oil and gas drilling—terminates transportation enhancements and repeals Safe Routes to School; the ensuing outcry was so loud that the bill was eventually scrapped, and an alternative that passed the Senate in March maintains funding for infrastructure improvements and SRTS—although its twin bill in the House attracted only Democratic supporters. As representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) remarked, its opponents seemed intent on turning back the transportation clock by 30 years, reaffirming the familiar attitude described by LAB president Andy Clarke: "Anything that interferes with cars is either a nuisance or an afterthought."

Schoolwise, this might be referred to as the Maple Avenue Mind-Set: passive acceptance of a status quo that promotes not only pollution and disease but also the lesson that children (who grow up to be citizens—and parents) are helpless. Amid this grand civic failure, the chief cause for encouragement comes from individuals who refuse to give in: the Marinos, Olsons, Skenazys, and Robinsons who prioritize fresh air and exploration and exercise, the powers-that-be be damned.

Adam Marino graduated from middle school in June 2011. Upon entering Saratoga Springs High School, the 14-year-old “enemy of the state” received a new read on the social impact of his defiance. Soon after starting classes there, he was talking to a girl he’d just met, and when he told her he’d gone to Maple Avenue, she asked, “Isn’t that the place that wouldn’t let some kid ride his bike?”